Where to From Here?

How quickly the complexion of things changes. A month ago--heck, a week ago--the pundits were chattering on about how Obama had overreached here and made his case poorly there and how the Democrats were certain to lose the House in November and leave Obama a lame duck before he could even get started. Now the "news analysis" pages are lit up with praise for the Democrats' historic achievement with health care reform and asking what the next big legislation will be.

It seems that financial regulatory reform is going to be the next big thing and will likely come down the pike fairly soon. Chris Dodd's bill has already cleared the Senate Banking Comittee, and is on its way to the Senate floor. The Republicans could, of course, filibuster, but one wonders how keen they are to be seen to carrying the big banks' water. So some kind of financial regulation is likely to emerge and get signed into law... I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion on whether Dodd's bill goes far enough. My uninformed hunch is that, rather like health care reform, it's a big step in the right direction but one that doesn't quite get all the way home.

What I want to know more, though, is when are we going to hear more about climate change? My fear is that we're going to have to wait a long time before carbon emissions reduction gets back on the agenda. To make the case for CO2 emissions reduction, you have to make the case for sacrifice--on everyone's part--and sacrifice is a hard sell at the best of times, much less when you're facing 10% unemployment and double digit budget shortfalls across the board. The thing is, we may not have time to wait for the economic climate to improve. Depending on who you read and how big a factor you believe methane clathrates in the Siberian permafrost will be, we might have as little as five years before global warming becomes a runaway train and it no longer makes any difference at all whether we adopt a cap-and-trade plan, a carbon tax or stick with business as usual.

The Copenhagen climate conference was a dud. The best that came out of it was an agreement to acknowledge the existence of the global warming problem. And yet had the US come with a greenhouse emissions scheme enshrined in law, indications were that China may--underline 'may'--have been willing to talk turkey on a binding emissions reduction treaty. And yet I fully understand that going into a Congressional election having voted 'yes' on legislation that doubles your constituents' electric power bills and the price of gasoline would be political suicide. I don't know how to overcome this impasse. The fact remains that it is going to be very difficult to persuade the general public that climate change will be a life- and civilization-threatening disaster until actually begins to draw blood--by which time it will be too late to forestall.

Maybe Al Gore should go back and run for the Senate again. How much more good could he do on the global warming front with the power directly to craft legislation then he does now by jetting around the world giving PowerPoint presentations and testifying before the Congress of which he once was a member? To bad that neither of Tennessee's Republican Senators are up for reelection in 2010. Would Gore consider a run for the House? Seriously, why the hell not?